Malware is malicious software which is designed to disrupt normal operation of a computer system, illicitly gather data, gain unauthorized access to a system, destroy data, or perform other malicious actions. In order to prevent malware attacks, conventional systems rely on anti-virus software to detect and destroy malware either as it is being installed to a system or upon periodic system scans.
Conventional anti-virus software operates on individual computers and relies on databases of signatures associated with known malware in order to identify malware on that individual computer. Much such conventional anti-virus software is vulnerable to zero-day attacks, in which new malware, whose signatures were not previously included with the signature database, attacks the computer. Certain more advanced conventional anti-virus software is able to detect some zero-day attacks by also relying on code analysis in order to search files not identified by signature detection for characteristics often associated with malware.